My contribution “Was North America Fertile Ground for the Early Phenomenological Movement?” is now available as open-access in American Philosophy and the Intellectual Migration edited by Sander Verhaegh. On this side of the pond, phenomenology had flourished particularly where the terrain had been prepared by the School of Brentano. Both on the continent:

One of the reasons for the fertile ground in Munich and for the origination of the phenom- enological movement precisely there, was that here there was a generally congenial atmos- phere. Throughout the years the people in Munich, more than at any other German university, had engaged very positively with Brentano and his School; i. e. with that circle of thinkers to which Husserl himself also belonged. (Schuhmann 1988, 97)

As well as in the British Isles:

Before World War I the interest in Husserl’s phenomenology was overshadowed by that in Franz Brentano, promoted chiefly by the analytical psychology of G. F. Stout, and in Alexius Meinong, stirred by Bertrand Russell’s three articles in Mind (1906). (Spiegelberg 1982, 662)

Did something similar occur across the pond in North America or were the background and context completely different? Was there a similar previous reception of Brentano and his school that facilitated the subsequent uptake of phenomenology? In the chapter I discuss the possible role of some of the competing elements in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century that favored and opposed the spread and flourishing of phenomenology in North America. Despite significant German influences, North America was not receptive to phenomenology in the beginning. The dominant philosophical orientation was first and foremost that of German Idealism and while philosophy and psychology were closely connected, the prevailing imported approaches of Wundt and Herbart were not congenial for the reception of Brentano and Husserl. The reaction against idealism in the US gave origin to various strands of “New Realism” and “Critical Realism”. Husserl’s work was initially taken up in the context of these debates, with limited interest in the original contributions of his phenomenological method. A clear indication for the early reception of Husserl is provided in the earliest book-length treatment of the School of Brentano in the US: Helen Huss Parkhurst’s dissertation “Recent Logical Realism.” Here Husserl is quite straightforwardly recruited as support for Meinong’s Gegenstandstheorie in the context of the local debates on realism.

our chronology of modern realism might better take its start with the year 1901, the date of the preface to the first edition of Meinong’s Über Annahmen, which inaugurated the modern phase of Platonic or subsistential realism. (Parkhurst 1930, 46)

Husserl is seen merely as a stepping stone in crossing the Atlantic, from Meinong, through Moore and Russell, to the American debates on realism, and not as forging an entirely new, alternative path into phenomenology.